Sunday, April 26, 2015

I didn't realize until tonight that Mad Men has been playing the long game of "false antagonist turned ally" versus "true antagonist." CGC is the temporary antagonist, but going back to Season 1, McCann has been the true antagonist, just waiting to overpower our Sterling Cooper partners with money. Kill them with kindness?

At any rate, they don't have to struggle for Heinz, the Coca-Cola of ketchup. They now have the gold standard, the Coca-Cola of Coca-Colas.

Diana the sad waitress is mercifully absent, although Don looks for her. I fear that she will meet Adam's fate because I have an illogical suspicion that she is somehow Don's half-sister, Archie's daughter. [Edited to add: Think about it. Don is born in 1926, and Arch is killed by a horse when he's 10, or 1936. If Archie has another encounter with a prostitute that had resulted in a child in 1935 or so, that would be about the right birth date for DtSW. That's why he creepily believes that he already knows her. Either that, or Diana is going to be Don's Charlotte Corday.]

But she is also Mildred Pierce, which is what Roger called her, with daughter dead of the flu (check), another living (check), and an ex-husband (check). Mildred would never have left her children, though.

When Diana comes on, I keep thinking of Keats's "I have been half in love with easeful death."

Why was Megan so angry last week that Don had to write her a check for a million dollars? How had he ruined her life? Giving her a shot at advertising and helping her acting career and financing her pretty lavishly for several years? I missed the memo where that defined ruination--and anyway, if you look back to the beginning, the moves are mostly all hers.

Edited to add, on rewatching S7Ep9 "New Business" (5/2017): Megan is an operator.

She was a secretary--admittedly a good one. She went after Don fairly aggressively, seducing him and flattering him about wanting to be a copywriter.

Every time she wants something or he does something for her, she says, "I love you, you know." He sees her as an idealized version of Youth and Motherhood in Season 4's finale, "Tomorrowland," marries her, makes her a copywriter, uses his influence to get her a break in commercials, and then bankrolls her very lavishly for at least two years.

He buys her a house on the hills above Los Angeles (Laurel Canyon? I don't know the geography) with a spectacular view. He visits her there, where she now is in a relationship with the red-haired friend from her acting class (or so it's implied) and instead of waiting tables or something has plenty of time to hang out at home, sunbathe, and get her toenails painted.

Megan drives away Stephanie, Anna's niece, out of jealousy, yet won't admit to her cruelty. Turning out an 8-months-pregnant woman who has just made her way to your remote doorstep and then lying about it? Come on.

When Don is threatened with expulsion from the agency and asks to come to California--he's been trying to hold their marriage together after the end of his Sylvia Rosen obsession--she tells him not to bother. Is it a coincidence that this happens only when he loses his job?

Megan claims that she will take care of herself, despite Don's offers of assistance, yet a year or so later she is badgering him for more money. She charges him with ruining her life, presumably because she left the soap opera and has never really had another job. If she never had another job, um--isn't the universe, or L.A., or someone, telling her something about where her talents lie, a little less cruelly than her mother had done but equally decisively?

Don was a terrible husband, as he told the woman on the plane, but how is he to blame for Megan's failures as an actress? Yet he meekly accepts the blame and gives her a million dollars. Is he to blame for her becoming, as Joan had predicted, "Just another failing actress with a rich husband"?

They went all the way back to Glencoe, really, to deny Pete and Trudy's daughter admittance to Greenwich Country Day School? This episode really is about everyone's history and its inescapability, isn't it?

Speaking of history, a nice callback: when Peggy is telling Stan about the baby she gave up, the music in the background is "Stranger on the Shore." That's the same music that played at the end of Season 2, "Meditations in an Emergency," when she told Pete that she had given up their baby. What are the odds that it would still be playing on the radio in 1970? It may have appeared in other episodes, too.

I love that Peggy asked Stan to stay on the phone, the way they used to stay on the phone when working late at night.

The other thing that this episode was about is people getting something that ought to be seen as good (as Don tells them all) but no one believing it.

Also about tantalizing illusions: even if you hope Bruce Greenwood will swoop in and be Joan's true love, that wouldn't be enough for her. Trudy and Pete back together? Stan and Peggy? Ted and college love? Roger and Marie? The Mad Men overlords won't permit this, I'm sure.

Update: NPR tells me that "Stranger on the Shore" also appears in Season 6, Episode 11, "Favors," but it doesn't fit my Peggy-son theory, so I will ignore it.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

First, go read Jonathan Rees's article about what ASU is doing with its MOOC "Global Freshman Academy. The basic idea is that ASU is pairing with EdX to give MOOC credit--and, for a $200/credit hour fee, ASU course credit--for those who complete its "courses." Rees rightly points out that this is a smart predation or "no honor among thieves" model, in which whoever steals first steals best.

Then read Dean Dad (Matt Reed), who asks, very sensibly, why anyone would pay $200/credit hour to get MOOC credit when credit at a CC is about $83 per credit hour AND you get access to libraries, tutoring, and other supports. "Where's the benefit?" he asks, and I can't see one.

It's an old principle in retail and drug dealing, of course: the loss leader. Give them a taste for free or near free, and they'll come back for more.

The private college version is to give heavy financial aid in Year One so that the student attends the school and then cut that aid in subsequent years, when the student is already committed. I have known people so embittered about this practice after going through it as students that, decades later, they won't give to the school even though they are now exactly the kind of well-off alums that the school wants to court.

Back to ASU's MOOC plan. Many paragraphs later, here are the specifics:

Courses are 7.5 weeks long, or what would be half a semester at Northern Clime and most universities.

It will consist of a "master teacher" and teaching assistants. No word yet on whether the "master teacher" will be immortalized on a hard drive somewhere to teach lessons in eternity, but maybe that's in a future iteration of the plan.

What about grading nonquantifiable subjects like, say, writing?

"Mastery in some courses -- math, for example -- is easier to track through multiple-choice tests or automated grading, but those tools won’t necessarily work in a freshman composition class.
“When you have 50,000 students versus 50 students, the methods of evaluation and the methods of assessment will change, but we will have both formative assessments and summative assessments at the end of the course,” Regier said. “We haven’t figured out what we’re going to do in every course yet, and we know every course is going to be different.”

To sum up: no plan yet. For now, ASU plans to have "actual people" grade the work. No word yet on whether those people will be tenure-track or have an otherwise stable job with health benefits, etc. Of course, this problem isn't unique to MOOC-inspired education.

Leaving aside the questions we've posed before about eliminating the fun parts of teaching a class and leaving us with the un-fun parts, like grading, I have to give ASU credit for not using commercial software to grade essays--yet. But I have to wonder:

Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Another conference has come and gone, with its checklist of things both stressful and happy:

Anticipation--or, let's call it by its real name, anxiety--about getting ready crowding out other thoughts and writing: check.

Getting up and/or getting to bed at ungodly hours so that you can make the plane: check.

The huge wave of relief after your presentation is done and it goes well: check.

Walking around a city and seeing a little bit of the sights: check.

Well, you all know the drill. But a long time ago I made some kind of implicit pact that the day after getting back from a conference would be a day, or at least a morning, of wild abandon rather than more work.

Here is what "wild abandon" looks like:

Sleep in until natural waking time (5:30 a.m.).

Watch Mad Men. Eat lots of breakfast.

Find half-empty bag of Guittard milk chocolate chips and eat them all up. Yes, in the morning. What? Who says breakfast can't have dessert?

Watch a Barbara Stanwyck movie.

Watch more Mad Men.

At noon, go into the study and start clearing out files for the next project.

Go for a walk.

Now, this doesn't exactly measure up to a scene of wild debauchery, but it has so many elements of academic transgression--television in the morning! Chocolate!--that it did feel like a reward.

How do you reward yourself for doing things that are good for you but not exactly fun?

"Is That All There Is?" played 3 times in this episode. We get it. Is Don having an existential crisis? Does he ever have anything else?

On the other hand, Don wears a striped shirt! The times they are a-changin'.

If Don came to me as a fortuneteller, I would totally clean up: "You are haunted by a mysterious brunette from your past, and she will return in your dreams. You cannot erase this figure through sexual contact with other brunette women."

Critics seem to think that Ken would have been better off writing his novel than getting back in the game with Dow. Matt Weiner says this, and so does Alan Sepinwall, who's the critic most worth reading. But to do this, Ken has to live on Cynthia's money, and he has always resolutely resisted that. Also, he has said that they have to pay (emotionally) for anything they get from Cynthia's parents and that there are lots of strings attached.

Isn't living on your wife's money just as corrupting, in its way, as working for Dow, even though it does not involve a hazmat suit? What Ken really has is two bleak choices: Dow's money or his wife's.

A thought experiment: Did Peggy have a choice in the meeting with the frat guys from McCann other than ignoring their halfwitted remarks and plowing ahead, if she wanted to enlist their help? Should Joan have brought along a flame-thrower? Discuss.

Note to Peggy: cheering Joan up, or dispensing sanctimony and blaming Joan for the way she looks, in an elevator is always a losing proposition. The decade will declare that "Sisterhood is powerful," but individual experiences might argue "not so much."

The internet loses its mind about Roger's and Ted's mustaches, and Weiner declares that people in future generations will think that the 2015 beards will look strange. Well, facial hair comes and goes. My bet is that people will think that men shaving their heads over the past 20 years or so will be thought odd, since that's historically a new development in male sartorial splendor, unless you're counting the era when men shaved their heads to wear wigs.

Since Season 6 was basically a repeat of Season 4 (fine performances with endless downward spiral), I'm hoping that Season 7 will repeat Season 5, if it needs to repeat anything. I want a happy ending of some kind for these characters.

Wednesday, April 01, 2015

For about 30 years, breathless news stories have been telling us that we want smart homes, including refrigerators that can automatically see when we're low on milk and order it for us.

This is to save us from the .0000025 seconds

that it takes to open the refrigerator door and see that we're out of milk.

Amazon Dash is the product of the same Refrigerator Needs to be Connected thinking: the unnecessary product that fulfills an imaginary need (but that doesn't stop Time from heralding it as "awesome.") It's a series of individual wi-fi controlled buttons that you put all over your house so that you can order the product from Amazon immediately, without walking the 10 steps to your computer.

For example, if you put a Tide button in the laundry room, and you notice that you need laundry detergent, you push the button and shazam! Two days later, the Tide shows up from Amazon. You can order juice, dog food, and toilet paper in the same way--because getting things a few days later when you need them immediately is much better than getting them right away.

Various news sites swear that this isn't an April Fool's prank, but I wonder.

1. Why would anyone want to look at, say, a Tide button every week for several months just so that the one time in 3-6 months you need it, you can press a button?
2. Why wouldn't it be faster, cheaper, and easier to buy the products when, like most people living within range of a grocery store, you go to the grocery store?
3. Wouldn't the button and its branding fade into the background, so that you'd forget to use it anyway?

And, in the imaginary needs department: I can see why it would be a marketer's dream to have tiny ads stuck to
cupboards and walls all over your house, but is it your dream?

Another entry in the "technology is always cool" connected-refrigerator line of thinking was the now-defunct CueCat. Remember those from the year 2000?

The idea was that you would somehow get a CueCat (Madio Mack apparently gave out the CueCats, but I never got one) with a unique serial number. You would then read the ads in the newspaper (how quaint!), scan the special CueCat code, and then get even more ad information when you looked on your computer. In the meantime, the CueCat people got information about your consumer preferences.

To CueCat's surprise, consumers seemed to be pretty happy with the level of advertising they were already being bombarded with, and the CueCat was a failure. They were an advertiser's dream of how consumers would ideally behave instead of something that was actually needed. Ironically,
they now have a second life as a barcode scanner--an actually useful item--on LibraryThing.

So I'm picturing the conversations now:

"You know what this laundry room needs? More Tide branding!"

"Tiny velour guest towels that don't dry anything? Check. Tiny floral-scented soaps that no guest will use? Check. What else does this bathroom need in the way of decor? A branded Dash button so you can order toilet paper every 3 months, that's what. Tells our guests we care about them."

"Who says dogs can't read? Mine have been ordering 26-pound bags of dog food every week since we installed the Dash button and they started pushing it. And the FedEx delivery person says he's never had such a good workout!"